I’ve been cartooning for several years using, among other things, the program GIMP. However, I’m completely new to animation; I even had to Google the words “keyframe” and “inbetween” to find out what they meant. Consequently, I may be trying to do things with Pencil2D that it is not intended to do.

On my first “experiment”, I had one object pass behind another object – I used two layers. When I attempted to do a color fill on the “nearer” object, the actual fill appeared on the “further” layer. Both layers were bitmap. I don’t know if this is me trying to do something the program is not intended to do or what.

I like using layers and have had single cell cartoons with 20-30 layers. Am I correct in assuming I can use multiple layers in Pencil2D? And if so, how many?

Are you using the latest stable version 0.6?
What you describe sounds like a feature we had in an older version. We expected that user would always want to paint behind their linework, therefore the fill tool did it automatically.

It was removed again though since it was never explained to the user that it happened and was therefore seen as a bug.

In version 0.6 this doesn’t happen anymore, if you select the layer you want to fill and fill it, then the filled content should appear on that layer.

@whiskey Along with what CandyFace has said, to answer your other question, Yes you can use as many layers as you want. Bear in mind however that using multiple layers with multiple frames will impact on your computer performance and Pencil2D’s stability due to RAM usage, so to be safe please read this FAQ entry for the prevention tips: